A 4-year-old boy has miraculously survived in the African wilderness surrounded by hyenas and other predators for six days.
The boy identified as Ayub managed to wander over 11 milles from his home in Asa, after he got separated from his brothers during a crazy storm as they were heading home from a day of herding livestock, pilot Roan Carr-Hartley said.
He was found 6 days later by pilot Roan Carr-Hartley, who works for the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, an orphan elephant rescue and wildlife rehabilitation program based in Tsavo.
Asa’s local chief had contacted the Wildlife Trust to ask if they could use their aircraft for the search.
Mr Carr Hartley told Newsweek: “A search party went out looking but couldn’t find him, and began to follow tracks. They did an amazing job tracking him for countless days without food.
“It was an unforgiving environment for any person to be alone, let alone a child so young.”
The little boy, Ayub, was alone in the wilderness and up against poor weather, starvation, predators and a case of malaria.
The pilot explained in a blog post he had no way of communicating with them while he was in the air and had organized for the search party to walk with a “white cloth tied to a long stick”, which would make it easier to find them in the dense bush.
He scanned the area for four hours and found nothing but an empty fuel tank and various animals, including hyenas and jackals.
He continued: “By the time I was overhead, a search party of 70 men were fanning through the wild scrubland in search of the little boy. I had a rough direction of the search party’s location given to me by the Chief – the party had tracked the boy to an area 7 kilometres from his village, but then the tracks started to become unreadable.”
He said it was an “unforgiving environment” for any person to be alone, let alone a child so young. He said there have been times when he hasn’t been able to locate a particular elephant for up to a week, let alone a four-year-old child.
Mr Carr Hartley wrote: “Because of heavy rains, there was no shortage of surface water. This at least gave me some peace of mind that the boy would be able to find water”.
“A heavy night of rain had washed away the boy’s tracks,” Carr-Hartley tells TODAY.com.
“I didn’t know what the boy was wearing and had only a very rough idea of where he got lost,” he added.
Carr-Hartley, 22, works as a pilot for a wildlife conservation group called Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, and he typically helps from the sky in wild animal rescues.
Working with the tracking team on the ground, Carr-Hartley started an aerial search about four and a half miles outside the boy’s village.
“It was kind of a guessing game after that, because his tracks disappeared early on,” he says.
Days passed and the rains continued, making for extremely difficult search conditions — and there was still no sign of the lost boy. Carr-Hartley says he started to lose hope.
“It’s hard to find an elephant, let alone a human on the ground,” Carr-Hartley tells TODAY.com of the view from his plane.
Then on Dec. 3, Carr-Hartley says, the men on the ground picked up the boy’s tracks. On Dec. 4, he flew up to Assa to begin searching again.
Because of the great distance he had to cover, Carr-Hartley could search for only a limited amount of time each day before running out of fuel.
“I was given a very general area which was 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) north of the village, which is extremely hard to pinpoint in such thick vegetation in such a vast area,” he says, adding he spent about an hour and a half searching from the air that day. “I started to get a little frustrated and rushed and knew time was ticking.”
As he was making a turn back, Carr-Hartley looked out his left window.
“I turned and saw the boy. I genuinely could not believe it,” he says. “I hadn’t even started looking for him, because I was looking for the ground team. I happened to turn at the exact moment and look out the left window. A tiny, tiny figure in this massive sea of shrubs and grass. It didn’t feel real at all.”
With no ability to communicate with the people searching on the ground, Carr-Hartley began flying in circles above the boy. After 30 minutes, he saw the ground team approaching.
“I opened the left window and started pointing and they obviously knew I had something, so they started running to where he was,” Carr-Hartley says. “There was an amazing moment where (one of the men) ran up to the boy and picked him up in the air above his shoulders and started cheering and smiling. Around 70 men descended on the boy and started chanting on the way back to the village.”
